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Comcast Proposes Self Regulation and P2P Bill of Rights
Torodung writes "In a recent move, Comcast has proposed a 'P2P Bill of Rights,' joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior. They have instead proposed comprehensive industry self-regulation and cooperation with major P2P software vendors as a lesser evil: 'Comcast is looking to further position itself as proactively — and responsibly — addressing the issue of managing peer-to-peer traffic that traverses its network, announcing Tuesday it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and Internet service providers.'"
Finally!
Wolves propose sheep "Bill of Rights".
Now why would anyone be concerned about ISPs meddling with their traffic? University of Washington researchers are set to release a paper today that says one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed along the way... http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/041608-isps-meddled-with-their-customers.html
Yeah, right. The ISPs have gotten so far into bed with the RIAA that the only thing listed in the "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the right to remain silent.
Comcast is beginning to feel the pressure, they are stalling for time now with faux "rights bills". Now is the time to push EVEN HARDER for full Net Neutrality legislation. We have them on the ropes, don't let up now!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Not surprising that missing from their list of "industry experts" are groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the EFF.
And here's the catch:
cooperation with major P2P software vendorsWhich still means that if the P2P "software vendors" (who are these?) pays them, they'll allow it. Great neutrality.
c++;
They suggest SELF-regulation...
I wonder how long this regulation will actually last before it goes back to the status quo.
or, how about instead they just provide the service people are, um, you know paying for?
Just move my packets around without f'ing with them, please and thank you.
BitTorrent was originally designed to be VERY tolerant of ISP's needs. Prior to the obfuscated protocol expansion, the first thing sent by each connection, on both sides, was "BitTorrent protocol", easy for a protocol analyzer to discover and assign a lower bandwidth tier.
So what did ISPs do? They throttled it to zero, rather than to an intermediate level we all could live with.
The end result: Encrypted BitTorrent, and ISPs using drastic methods like spoofing reset packets.
Where is the SMTP bill of rights and responsibilities?
Or how about a bill of rights and responsibilities for ISO downloading? HTML surfing?
When only one protocol/application is named, we are in for a long line of regulations (self imposed by ISPs or not) regarding every type of use for our Internet connections.
Car analogy? The speed limit is 75 if there is only one passenger, but 55 if there are three or more. 35mph if you have a child under the age of 12 in the vehicle. That is unless they are blood relatives, then the speed limit is 65 regardless of passenger count.
Rights and responsibilities have already been defined by the contract you sign with the ISP in the first place. They have gone to great effort to tell you what you can't do in that contract, and vaguely explained for what reasons your account might be canceled.
This new effort is an attempt to go back on that agreement, to modify it without pissing end user's off, and to get away with throttling in such a way as there is NO government oversight nor any other kind of oversight.
Sorry, sounds like I'm being bitchy, but if you don't push back on each little thing, it will be 'give an inch, they take a mile' and we'll end up with an Internet connection that is little more use than a dial up connection, and the price will continue to rise while service degrades.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, I just see the writing on the wall here.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I'd been following this Comcast P2P news in the past, but I hadn't really noticed any issues with torrents over my Comcast connection. So, naturally, I didn't think much of it since things were working fine. But in the past week when I try to download any torrent, web browsing is slowed to the point of being useless -- and that's _with_ upload speeds throttled to 3kbps. I know something changed on their end, because everything has remained identical on mine -- I don't even own the stupid Comcast-issued modem.
Normally I'm really patient about all this sort of stuff, but I'm paying $59.95 per month on a student budget for shit internet. Fuck this and fuck Comcast. If only I could set up something with a place like Speakeasy and resell to my neighbors... but I can't afford the sysadmin time cost, nor do I feel as comfortable now that Best Buy owns Speakeasy.
Don't think it's just P2P that Comcast is trying to control. I've noticed that when I attempt large downloads from Apple (regardless of material, I've seen it on both iTunes movies and the iPhone SDK), they just craaawl along. (~200 kbps).
When I switch to the VPN at my company, the speeds suddenly shoot up to around 7-8 Mbps, even with the encryption/tunnel overhead, and still traveling over Comcast's network. Can't just be coincidence, eh?
I'll ask the obvious question here... Why subscribe to these providers that limit or restrict your traffic?
You may respond that, they are your only choice. Well unless you choose to go without or you choose to help lobby for better legislation then you're stuck.
Also are you willing to pay more for your internet? I choose to go with a DSL provider who is 1/3 the speed of Comcast and I pay a little more every month to be with them. Why? They don't limit my traffic and they let me have a static IP. To me it's worth it.
Just my two cents. I see a lot of people complaining but most don't want to do more then just that. Vote with your dollar! Donate to lobbies that are fighting for your cause. Otherwise stop complaining.
Anyone care to explain to me why a completely informal, unenforced "Bill of Rights", between Comcast and whatever commercial entities exist in P2P, is any better for consumers than government intervention?
Or answer this: If Comcast really is willing to cooperate, why are they so terrified of government regulation? Why is a legally mandated "Bill of Rights" worse for them than what they are proposing?
The obvious answer is, if it was a law, they couldn't simply violate it.
Next question: Why is Comcast working with BitTorrent, the company? Why do they need to "work with" any P2P corporations, rather than simply dropping their packet shapers and letting P2P protocols work well? Smells to me like Microsoft cutting a deal with Novell -- Microsoft obviously can't cut a deal with Linux itself, as it's a completely distributed, fault-tolerant community, so there's no one CEO to buy -- so they make a deal with Novell, while leaving everyone else out in the cold. Smells to me like Comcast is trying to do the same with P2P -- they can't make a deal with every single filesharer, everywhere, and they won't accept simply falling back to net neutrality, which is what we really want -- so they make a deal with some company which does filesharing, leaving everyone else out in the cold.
Gotta love the smell of bullshit in the morning.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
All the players who have power: (read the large businesses), get together and have a scrum. Not invited to the table are the (1) the public, or (2) the content creators. - both of which are large and mostly unorganized groups of individuals.
Sounds suspiciously like the process the industry went through to re-invent copyright law.
One only needs to be guaranteed "Rights" in the context of Wrongs. Comcast and Virgin and others should get their head completely out of their ass and start providing a real **customer** focused service (instead of profit-driven) and this whole issue goes away.
Finally?
I think you misunderstand.
Rights are for the ISPs.
Responsibilities are for the users.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I expect that the definition of "Rights" in "P2P Bill of Rights" will be the same as the one in "Digital Rights Management". There will be a whole lot you can't do, and very little that you can do, which you already had before the bill.
P2P Bill of Restrictions?
Whenever I hear this, I always ask: Are you seriously suggesting that there be more than one company in a given area running physical cables to every house? Or are you suggesting more government regulation to force them to share the cables they've got?
It sounds funny, yes, but why is that absurd? Insert anything else in place of the words "government regulation" -- like, oh, "my kid" or "the construction company" -- and it doesn't seem absurd anymore.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How about this?
1) Comcast's customers shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. pay their bill).
2) Comcast shall fulfill their obligations (i.e. deliver any network traffic without prejudice).
You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
Of course perfection is usually out of reach, but that's never a worthy argument against improvement.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature
And we care about it, and since, by your argument, we are part of nature, nature apparently does care.
Hell, maybe we're even one way by which nature's trying to solve a given problem.
Attribution of motive to probably motiveless mechanics aside, the truth is that whether by intention or accident, we're here in nature with both some degree of problem-solving skills and values. There's no reason not to apply the problem-solving skills toward those values.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
What worries me even more there, is that it seems to be rather called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" of users. Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you, and thou art an evil spawn of Satan and, yeah, verily, a ruthless predator upon thy neighbours, if you actually use more than 1/100 of all that unlimited, unmettered usage we advertised" bullshit that disgusts me of ISPs already.
Now, I'm not a Comcast subscriber, and I'm not even a heavy user. Other than Slashdot and the like, and the mandatory gazillion banners on the average web page elsewhere, my biggest downloads are the occasional MMO patches. They're not that big, so actually I'd rather stop subsidizing the heavy downloaders.
But if I'm to look at it impartially, and through the glasses of whatever ethics my education stuck into my head, it smells like pure BS.
It's _not_ some shiny-hippy... err... happy communal sharing scheme. If it were, I could maybe see the point of trying to tar and feather anyone who's used more than his fair share. But that's not it. It's one company selling a service to a person. It's their job to see that they can actually provide the service they charge for.
To illustrate the fundamental difference:
- if me and the neighbours were to have a potluck dinner, then it's ok to be annoyed if someone eats ten times more than they brought to the table.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered.
- if me and the co-workers pool out petty change and buy a Wii and a TV at the office, then it's a communal sharing thing. It's not nice to be the guy who hogs it full time. The others should get a chance at it too.
But if we go to some (hypothetical) arcade that advertises that you can play all day for the flat fee of a ticket, then that's it. It's their job to see that they have enough machines and space for that kind of offer. If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours for nostalgia sake, well, that's what was advertised there. I'm just using what I paid for.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they _should_ provide free unlimited anything whatsoever. It's up to them to decide whether they can afford to do that or not. But if they decided to advertise it that way, then it's their problem to have enough of it.
Even briefer, I don't feel any _responsibility_ (since we're talking a "bill of responsibilities") to _not_ use a resource that was sold to me as an unlimited and unmetered resource. The users there paid for a service. They're not pooling their funds to create some communal internet scheme (and indeed ISPs have fought tooth and nail against municipal ISP ideas), they have paid fair and square for a service, and have _no_ duty or responsibility to leave enough bandwidth for the others. The contract isn't with any other users, it's with the ISP.
I honestly don't see why the ISPs are any different from any other service provider. If I buy a monthly ticket for the bus, then everywhere in the world I'd feel free to use it as much and as often as I need to. If I have to make 20 trips in a day, heck, that's exactly what such tickets are for. If the transport company doesn't have enough busses to serve everyone they sold tickets to, then it would be seen as their shortcoming. Not as, basically, "some evil, unscrupulous users use more than their fair share of bus trips, and we must tar and feather them." They don't get to draw up bills of customers' responsibilities, to weasel out of providing the service they sold.
I don't see what makes ISPs that special, basically. In the name of... exactly _what_, do they get to draw bills of customers' reponsibilities?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'd rather trust a goverments incompentence than a company's greed. Thank god I live in a country where they don't charge tolls.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative (schools, roads and the like) that also provide for access that is as fair and public as the services you say are inadequate.
For what it's worth, I agree that the US government isn't doing what it needs to. I can't say I agree that that failure means that government can't work, it just means that the US government isn't working.
http://www.unfocus.com/
It would seem, judging by the behavior of modern ISPs, that this is happening anyways. Prices are high, service is mediocre, and now we're getting a game of content provider (and ultimately consumer) extortion.
Market forces aren't working because there's an insufficient amount of competition. Either there needs to be regulation, or there needs to be a breakup of the large ISPs. If government shouldn't do this, then who should? If the market can give no remedy to the consumers, then who does?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Swarms and multicast are just like poop and flies, they may stink and you may not like them, but they belong together.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative
Some of those things, like roads are not widely available as a private sector business. So let's look at retirement, Social Security costs 15.3% of every paycheck. From everything I've seen, it won't actually be there for me to live off of when I reach retirement age. However, if I save only $500 a month at 4% interest for my 40 year career life span, at 65 I will have $590,980.66. Granted that's not huge, but it's a nice bit better than the nothing I will be getting from Social Security. And that's only if I save $500 a month, if I could save $1250 a month (15% of a $100,000 a year job) then my retirement fund would be $1,477,451.67. Which in a 4% yield savings account would give me $59,098.04 a year to live on in my retirement. So retirement, as managed my the US government sucks worse than a lemonparty link.
Now let's look at schools, I think the Washington Post has already explained this one nicely. There is a Snopes discussion of this very topic, but the main point made there is that private schools are selective, they send back the troublemakers and under performers, but that is not true of all private schools. I would like to point out that the second boarding school I linked to costs less for one year room, board, and education than what DC spends per student on education only.
We are all just people.
Something like the competition we see between UPS, FedEx, DHL? They each own their own roads and airports from point to point, oh wait, hey they are using municipal roads and airports to operate their delivery equipment and provide a competitive service in a free market. What a concept, now lets apply it to the monopolies you just mentioned to they too can compete in a free market.
burnin
> Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
You call it a "voucher program" I call it immediately inflated prices to cash in on government handouts. No one knows how to cash in on government money like private business.
> Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
Public schools, even when woefully underfunded as they are now, have always outperformed private schools.
Additionally, most of the 37 countries that rank higher than the US in terms of quality of service with regards to the healthcare industries, are public systems (socialized medicine). Many of them are privately run, and government funded (like single payer systems), and can rank near the top - despite most of them costing far less per capita, than the US's completely private system.
To again attempt to build some common ground, I have no problem with government hiring private companies to provide public services (single payer healthcare for example). That's just effective governance - when used appropriately - one type fix doesn't work for every situation - privately contracted bridge maintenance contracts, like they did with the Brooklyn bridge recently, don't work out well.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Yes, and people went to jail for it. I think what should be altered in such situations in this removal of the legal personhood of the company so that the shareholders get fines and jail terms relative to the amount of stock they own. I think the markets would work a lot more responsible if those investing in companies, even if its hundreds of thousands of them, were directly responsible in proportion to their ownership for the misdeeds of the companies they invest in. It would make shareholders a helluva lot more critical of the people they put in power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Thanks for playing, you might want to actually read this time.
"Any company can buy out competition if the competition is willing to pay. So what? If group A wants to freely trade X amount of property that it rightly owns, to group B in exchange for Y compensation, what right does anyone have to stop them? On the same token, nobody has the right to stop group C from coming into existence and providing a competing service."
This is a non-point and I do not, and never have tried to argue it. The statements were:
1. ""How did it become a monopoly in the first place?"
A1. They used valid legal practices and shrewd business planning like any other successfull company to grow market share.
A2. They used the market share to leverage other competitors out of business, also legal and a regular business practice.
A3. They were left the only company to choose in an area because of the startup costs to compete with such a large company that has the numbers on their side. They can charge people less and less if they want to. Since they have such a large market share they have so many customers their operating costs are exponentially low. Less per user.
2. "What stops another company from springing up to provide cable internet services for cheaper?"
A1. The existing company being able to undercut the competition from established recurring income.
A2. The existing company already having recouped their startup costs (cables) and therefore having more available resources.
3. "So the monopoly is with the cable lines? And what stops another company from supplying their own lines - you guessed it, government regulation."
A1. Again you use no actual facts or real logic to sustain your point. You just assume that you are correct. This is a logical fallacy since no actual connection is being made for your assumption of a direct connection between government regulation and the failure of a startup competing business.
A2. If the monopoly is with the cable lines: the investment is so massive to deploy a competing system over a large enough area that the initial output of funds would take years to recoup at a minimum with an "average" monthly charge. The existing company that has already recouped that investment can lower their charges below the ability of the other company to pay back even their interest and still pay their employees to keep their system maintained. This is called the market entrance cost and is there in some form for most business models. This is what keeps most startups from competing with the big boys directly. If they are left alone and not seen as a threat they can flourish, but if they are targetted by the larger companies they can be pushed out of business because of the flexability of the large company to undercut their business temporarily so they cannot survive without further investments. Once they are gone the large company raises their rates again to recoup the losses and continues to leave them high since they are the only game in town again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So if you've enjoyed playing, cite your assinine assumptions about govt corruption or shut up. You're trying to argue that standard market forces don't exist, or don't effect things as much as some unknown government practice heretofore unseen to the business realm, and that it is conspiring to bring down small businesses with secret laws and actions you can't name. Please.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I'm tempted to resort to sarcasm here, because what you said is so stupid. However, I won't, because if you're that stupid, you will think that my sarcasm is agreeing with you. Instead, I'll point out that it's the greed of competing entities that forces them to be honest or lose your business. Who competes with the federal government? Other country's governments? The transaction cost of switching is a little high. That's why governments are incompetent -- because they're greedy and have nobody to keep them honest. If Verizon pisses me off, my transaction cost for switching is $175.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist